Feast day: October 5
St. Faustina Kowalska
Polish sister with three semesters of education whose diary of her visions of Jesus launched the Divine Mercy devotion now practiced worldwide.
Helena Kowalska was born in 1905, the third of ten children in a poor and devout Polish family, and had little schooling, going into domestic service as a young teenager. Feeling a call to religious life, at twenty she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, taking the name Sister Maria Faustina, and spent her years as a cook, gardener, and porter in various convents — hidden, ordinary work.
Behind that ordinary life lay an extraordinary interior one. Beginning in 1931, she reported visions and conversations with Jesus, who appeared to her with rays of red and pale light streaming from his heart and asked that an image be painted of him as 'Divine Mercy,' inscribed 'Jesus, I trust in You.' Through her he asked that the world be reminded that his mercy is greater than any sin, and called for a Feast of Divine Mercy and a chaplet of prayers.
At his direction she kept a diary recording these messages and her own spiritual struggles, a work that would become, after her death, one of the most widely read spiritual books of the modern age. She suffered much — physically from tuberculosis, and interiorly from doubt and the fear of being deceived — yet held fast in trust and obedience to her confessors.
She died in 1938 at only thirty-three, almost entirely unknown. Decades later the devotion to the Divine Mercy she had asked for spread across the whole world, championed by her countryman Pope John Paul II, who canonized her in 2000 — the first saint of the new millennium — and established Divine Mercy Sunday for the universal Church.
Her message in five words — 'Jesus, I trust in You' — is now printed on images in churches on every continent.
“Jesus, I trust in You.”
— St. Faustina Kowalska
Image: Stanisław Sztama (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
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